LONDON — The bots are reading, but they are not writing. That is the line Wikipedia’s co-founder Jimmy Wales drew this week, and it is a line that cuts straight to the heart of a growing tension between the world’s largest free encyclopedia and the artificial intelligence industry that feeds on it. Speaking on the sidelines of a climate action week event in London, Wales laid out a stark reality: AI still hallucinates.
The problem of fabricated output, presented with total confidence, has been reduced in newer models but remains, in his words, “very, very bad.” That is why Wikipedia will not let AI edit articles directly. Trust is not there.
The irony is thick. AI platforms rely heavily on Wikipedia’s content to answer user questions. This reliance has driven a surge in bot traffic to the site.
Human traffic, meanwhile, has dropped. Wales called the decline “meaningful” but “not a disaster.” Wikipedia’s business model does not depend on page views.
It runs on donations. So a drop in human readers does not directly threaten its finances. But the bot traffic does cost money.
Lots of it. “Hammering us with millions of requests costs real money,” Wales said, pointing to the cost of running servers. This is where the story gets concrete.
Wales encouraged AI companies to “pay their fair share.” And some already have. Wikipedia has signed agreements with several tech giants.
The site is also “starting to block the ones who aren’t behaving themselves,” Wales noted. He added a cautious: “We’ll see how that goes.” The money question is not small. AI companies scrape Wikipedia for training data and to power chatbot answers.
The encyclopedia foots the server bill. For years, that arrangement was a quiet one.
Now it is becoming a public negotiation, with Wales naming the price of access. But the ban on AI editing is not absolute. Wales sees a role for the technology in alerting Wikipedia’s human editors to niche news stories that would otherwise slip through the cracks.
The AI would flag. The humans would edit. The line stays drawn.
That line matters because Wikipedia’s model is built on human judgment. Volunteers argue, verify, and rewrite.
They catch errors. They debate sources. An AI that hallucinates confidently would poison that process.
Wales is not willing to risk it. The broader context is a tech industry that has rushed to deploy generative AI, often before fully understanding its flaws.
Wikipedia, by contrast, is moving slowly. It is a deliberate choice. The encyclopedia ranks among the most visited websites in the world.
It has leverage. It is using it. How this plays out will depend on whether other AI companies follow the early signatories of those agreements.
Wales left the door open to more deals. He also left the threat of more blocks.
The bots keep coming. The servers keep running. And for now, the editing stays human.
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